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To Pickle Red Cabbage

A pickled red cabbage prepared with vinegar, cloves, allspice, mace, and cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pickle Red Cabbage

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Remove the outer leaves and stalk from the cabbage.

  2. Quarter the cabbage lengthwise and slice crosswise.

  3. Place it in a deep dish, sprinkle with salt, cover with another dish, and let it sit for 24 hours.

  4. Drain the cabbage and pat it dry.

Make the pickling liquor

  1. In a pot, combine enough white wine vinegar to cover the cabbage with equal amounts of whole cloves, allspice, and some mace.

  2. Add a little cochineal for color, then boil the vinegar and spices for 5 minutes.

Pickle and seal

  1. Place the cabbage in a stone jar and pour the boiling vinegar over it.

  2. Cover the jar with a cloth until it cools, then seal with a cork and tie with leather.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Cabbage + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together443 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red cabbage
Forms the bulk of the pickle and keeps a firm, crisp bite after salting.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cabbage, firming it and concentrating its flavor before pickling.
White wine vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the cabbage and gives the pickle its sharp taste.
Whole cloves and allspice
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavor to the pickling liquor.
Cochineal
Colors the cabbage and liquor a deep red-purple.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the salted cabbage. Salting draws out a lot of water; if the cabbage is not drained and patted dry, excess moisture dilutes the boiling vinegar and weakens both the flavor and the preserving effect.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, vinegar, clove, allspice, mace):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, vinegar, clove, allspice, mace. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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